Overcome bad day at work

Question

Situation: one of my recent commits brought a issue in prod, though it had 0 user impact but got to hear a word from manager.

- Is it okay to recieve this kind of situation?

- How do you deal with such things?

- What can be done to avoid this?

i0ii5CZuEUkFbRd6a4 · Accepted Answer

Well, to limit defects going to prod, typical things like unit/integration/user acceptance testing all apply.

You can't eliminate bugs making it to prod. Even the most advanced tech companies miss bugs from time to time. So try not to expect yourself to ship defect-free code because the only way to do that is to never ship anything.

If the feedback you received from your manager was inappropriate, rude, inflammatory, or otherwise problematic you shouldn't have to deal with that. A good manager will look for ways to be constructive and not purely critical.

jeffweiner · Answer

Big Tech companies have multiple bugs every day. What can be done to avoid this? I guess this meaning not get punished for pushing a bug to prod? My advice is to jump ship and let your manager's little boat sink.

grant · Answer

My first computer science instructor told me the story of how a programmer once brought down the entire at&t network by placing a `break` statement in the wrong place. That developer not only kept their job, their manager was promoted sometime later.In short, yes, it's okay to make mistakes. In fact, insofar as you're being truthful that there was no user impact, your manager should be thanking you for finding a vulnerability they can add to the test suite, preventing the issue from ever playing a part in a much worse scenario.

OrangePliers · Answer

If we all quit after breaking production there would be no one left to run production 😂 I’ve been in a similar situation where I was blamed for a production issue and was put on PIP during my probation period. The scrutiny vindicated me because I demonstrated best practices and transparency. I later realised that the PIP was unfair because I was asked to fix a show stopper, for a feature I didn’t know existed, when the dev lead was on holiday with less than 3 months experience with the code base. 🤷🏾‍♂️Keep learning, up your game and increase your time between production incidents. 💪🏾

RatherPleasent · Answer

Try to learn from the experience for yourself as well as your team. Maybe there was some testing that was missed that can be improved for the future.  Also pay attention to how your team reacts. Obviously prod should be protected and bad commits aren't a good thing, but pointing fingers doesn't help either. So hopefully they improve the process, explain what to do to avoid it in the future, and they don't harp on the mistake.

amart · Answer

Mistakes happen. I like to call them learning opportunities. You will have many of them in your career. I think you're asking the right questions. My hope would be that the word you heard from your manager was a decent conversation and not a toxic one.Do your best to avoid any emotional attachment to the cause of the defect, so you can approach it from a level-headed place. If this were a defect someone else had introduced, would it have changed your approach to how you handled it all? I try to look at it through that lens. In addition to the excellent advice already on this thread, I also look at my own internal process for development and do my best to evaluate if there is something I can change there to help reduce (note: not eliminate) the chance of something similar happen in the future.

Overcome bad day at work

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